Saturday, 31 August 2013

US Congress vote on Syria: a precursor to western involvement in a regional war?

President Obama's announcement that he will give Congress a vote on whether
to attack the Assad regime may seem like a step back from the brink of military
action for now, but it is just as likely to re-boot a slide towards ever-deeper
western involvement in a widening Middle East conflict.

No doubt Congress, egged on in the spirit of response to '9/11' (what has that got to do
with the Syrian civil war?), will give enough legitimacy to Obama to launch the
missiles at Assad and his men. Obama will proclaim that this is a ‘limited’
action. But far from being limited, in reality a precedent will have been
created that will suck the west ever deeper into the Syrian civil war. The
'limited' strike will achieve nothing except to inflame the already insoluble
carnage. Very little damage will be done to the Assad war machine. More
atrocities from the Assad regime will follow (with the anti-Assad atrocities
receiving less publicity in the west). The action will be condemned as a
failure. But paradoxically this very failure will be used as the argument for
further action by the west. Plans for 'no fly zones' will be drawn up and
implemented and bit by bit we will be part of the war with the Assad regime.

There will be the added danger that we are up against, in this dispute,
not some isolated tyrant as in the case of the Libyan intervention, but a
deadly combination of not just bewildering ethnic and political complexity but
the involvement of forces with which the west is already almost at war.
These include Hezbollah and Iran - not to mention a Russian presence with
whom we could, in theory, actually come into military conflict.
Remember the Russian's have their own military base in the Syrian port of
Tartus.

The situation in Syria is so convoluted and so toxic (in many different
meanings of the term) that the results of growing western intervention, will,
in hindsight make western intervention in Iraq look like a blinding success by
comparison. In Syria, realistically, the best that can be hoped for in the
medium term is a cease-fire that will, for the foreseeable future, create an
effectively divided country - with a severe danger of an internal civil
war simmering amongst the rebels (and a lot of them no friends of the west).
Even if western action did succeed in defeating the Assad regime, at very great
cost, the ethnic divisions would remain, and rear up soon again, just as they
have done in Iraq. Western involvement will make a mockery over our efforts to
mediate between Israel and Palestinians since the Syrian civil war, with
western involvement, will extinguish the already flickering hopes of progress.
In a worst case, but still plausible, scenario, western involvement could
promote a wider regional conflagration.

It is tremendously ironic that the west is cranking up its expensive war
machines for 'humanitarian' purposes, when Syrians inside the country are dying
and starving. Yes, they want ‘their’ side to win and be helped by the west, or
Hezbollah, or whoever to help them 'win'. But if humanitarian assistance is
really our aim, and not just the use of this emotive appeal to promote more
war, then we should be spending on genuine food, refugee relief, medical help,
not in spending on the firing of tomahawk missiles.

About Me

Dr David Toke is Reader in Energy Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations in the University of Aberdeen. You can see his profile at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/socsci/people/profiles/d.toke
He has been campaigning on energy issues for around 30 years, and in 1990 his book ‘Green Energy’ was an influential argument in the UK for a non-nuclear approach to dealing with global warming. He was a key player in the campaign to establish feed-in tariffs for small renewable projects in the UK, achieved in 2008. He has consistently argued that the UK's proposed nuclear power programme is not only uneconomic compared to renewable energy, but that it is undeliverable short of one or more governments signing what amounts to a 'blank cheque' to pay for the nuclear power plant. His latest book, published by Routledge is called 'Low Carbon Politics'. He has published many papers in leading political science journals on environmental, especially energy (and renewable energy) issues and he is also a frequent and well cited contributor to the journal 'Energy Policy' published by Elsevier. His twitter address is @DaveToke